Recent Articles

Blogger Keith Ng, who went public over the deeply-careless kiosk implementation in New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development job-seeker kiosks, has named the man that gave him the tip-off as Ira Bailey.

The revelation, which Ng writes was made with Bailey’s permission, adds a certain spice to the story, since Bailey is an activist who was arrested in 2007 as part a series of raids over “terrorist” camps in New Zealand’s Urewera Ranges. Charges were not pursued.

Ng states that Bailey had asked the MSD whether it offered any kind of “bug-bounty”, and denies that this inquiry amounted to a “demand” for money.

While not describing the request as a demand, ministry CEO Brendan Boyle said yesterday that “He indicated he would be prepared to co-operate with us if there was a reward for providing information. We made it very clear we didn’t provide money in situations like that.”

According to Ng, Bailey discovered the security vulnerability while trying to work out why a kiosk didn’t load his USB key: “he had a poke around the file system to find it – and found the giant vulnerability instead”.

The kiosks were installed by Dimension Data, which earlier this year reportedly conducted an audit of the system.

While calling the privacy breach “totally unacceptable”, NZ prime minister John Key has lashed out at Bailey, saying in a television interview that Bailey should have identified the kiosks as vulnerable when he first contacted the ministry.

The political row over the privacy breach seems certain to widen, since the security of government information has been a sore point for some time. In 2009, that country's Privacy Commissioner criticized the security of citizens' information across a range of departments.

New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corporation is under siege after last year releasing thousands of customer records by accident. ®